Zahava K. McKeon – författare

Well before the current age of discourse, deconstruction, and multiculturalism, Richard McKeon propounded a philosophy of pluralism showing how "facts" and "values" are dependent on diverse ways of reading texts. This book is a transcription of an entire course, including both lectures and student discussions, taught by McKeon. As such, it provides an exciting introduction to McKeon''s conception of pluralism, a central aspect of neo-Pragmatism, while demonstrating how pluralism works in a classroom setting. In his lectures, McKeon outlines the entire history of Western thinking on the sciences. Treating the central concepts of motion, space, time, and cause, he traces modern intellectual debates back to the ancient Greeks, notably Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, and the Sophists. As he brings the story of Western science up to the twentieth century, he uses his fabled semantic schema (reproduced here for the first time) to uncover new ideas and observations about cosmology, mechanics, dynamics, and other aspects of physical science. Illustrating the broad historical sweep of the lectures are a series of discussions which give detail to the course''s intellectual framework. These discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell are perhaps the first published rendition of a philosopher in literal dialogue with his students. Led by McKeon''s pointed questioning, the discussions reveal the difficulties and possibilities of learning to engage in serious intellectual communication.

This text is a transcription of a full course, including both lectures and student discussions, taught by McKeon. As such, it provides an introduction to McKeon's conception of pluralism, a central aspect of neo-Pragmatism, while demonstrating how pluralism works in a classroom setting. In his lectures, McKeon outlines the history of Western thinking on the sciences. Treating the central concepts of motion, space, time and cause, he traces modern intellectual debates back to the ancient Greeks, notably Plato, Aristotle, Democritus and the Sophists. As he brings the story of Western science up to the 20th century, he uses his fabled semantic schema to uncover ideas and observations about cosmology, mechanics, dynamics and other aspects of physical science. Illustrating the broad historical sweep of the lectures are a series of discussions which give detail to the course's intellectual framework.

This volume of essays is an important introduction to the thought of one of the twentieth century's most significant yet underappreciated philosophers, Richard McKeon. The originator of philosophical pluralism, McKeon made extraordinary contributions to philosophy, to international relations, and to theory-formation in the communication arts, aesthetics, the organization of knowledge, and the practical sciences. This collection, which includes a philosophical autobiography as well as the out-of-print title essay "Freedom and History" and a previously unpublished essay on "Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry," is a testimony to the range and systematic power of McKeon's thinking for the social sciences and the humanities.